TWD: Eastern Mediterranean Pizza

 Great Pizza, easy dough!

The base for this pizza is a pita bread. For a yeasted bread I thought it's relatively easy to handle, two rising/resting periods not more. That's ok.

The Eastern Mediterranean Pizza comes with a tomato topping, some pine nuts and a lot of spices. I added some goat cheese, omitted the lamb (no meat in this house) and gave it some zucchini instead.


I made half the recipe and ended up with for smaller pizzas, just enough for four people for a soccer-
watching-snack. I had some dough-leftovers which I mixed up wit fresh spices and made plain mini-pitas from it (sorry, no pictures). Both - the pizza and the pitas - were really great in taste, even the day after.

Baking time was a bit longer than in the recipe, but maybe the 7,8 mins in the recipe would have even been enough.

To find out about the reciep, have a look at Dorie Greenspans book on p. 156!

TWD: Summer Vegetable Tart

I'm not sure if this counts as a TWD-post because I made so many changes to this "tart", it actually turned out another recipe.

Two problems arose: First, you can't keep this tart. I always bake Sunday and bring my baking goods to work Monday, so this was a problem. And it seemed to be very difficult to make smaller tartes as the dough is not that easy to handle.
Secondly, for me the vegetables in the recipe are no summer vegetables in any way. Maybe I am living in the wrong part of the world, but peppersweets are never in season round here and mushrooms are more associated with autumn in Vienna.

Oh, and a third problem: I really had no idea what the directions for dough treatment ment. As there is no picture of the tart I was absolutely  blank what the recipe wanted me to do. So I had to do a lot of improvisation.

I decided to make nests - my first try. I took smaller pieces of the dough and arranged them randomly in muffin pans. Next time, I learned, I would reverse the pans and put the dough around the "outside" to make sure it is through all the way and not only at the edges.

I filled the nests with a zucchini-tomato mix with a lot of fresh spices and "braid cheese", a very salted version of goat cheese (think dense salted haloumi in very small strips, arranged to a braid).

Like that, I liked it a lot. I served it with some spinach salad (with green beans and dried tomatoes), what made it a perfect summer dinner.

But, as I said at the beginning, I am really not sure this counts as TWD...

If you want to find out what the other bakers did (I do! I am really curiuos what it SHOULD have looked like!) go to the TWD-page. And if you are interested in the original recipe of the Summer Vegetable Tart, just have a look in the book by Dorie Greenspan on  page 436.

TWD: Cheese&Tomato (and Asparagus) Galette

Cheese and Tomato are fine, but asparagus is (still) in season and during this time of the year I could live from just asparagus and strawberries! So I made some changes and turned this galette into a cheese-tomato-aparagus galette.

Honestly, I did not only make some small changes but many bigger ones. But I think it still counts as a TWD-baking :o]

First, I made mini-galettes. I ended up with 5 pieces. Then I left out the Monterey Jack and spread the galettes with some buffallo ricotta I had left. Instead of fresh tomatos I used dried ones (the soft version), gave some leek and aparagus in small pieces on the dough, spiced it with lemon pepper and tarragon, and finished them with a thin aspargus head.
But hey - that's still a galette with cheese and tomato!!

I liked the dough already very much when we made the berry galette because it's a bit like a tart without tart-problems (like a dough getting to burnt or not enough brown). Here I used polenta, what is more or less the same as cornmeal in the end, but chrunchier.

The taste was just great, even the next day when I brought them to office and me and my colleagues nibbled them away. And I really like recipes that allow a lot of variations.

Try this recipe! It's fast, easy and tasty!